Apply Directly to the Forehead
Wouldn’t be great to never see or hear about these people again?
Nadya Denise Doud-Suleman Gutierrez
AKA Octomom
Nadya Denise Doud-Suleman Gutierrez, known as Octomom in the media, is an American woman who came to international attention when she gave birth to octuplets in January 2009. The Suleman octuplets are only the second full set of octuplets to be born alive in the United States and, one week after their birth, surpassed the previous worldwide survival rate for a complete set of octuplets set by the Chukwu octuplets in 1998. The circumstances of their high order multiple birth have led to controversy in the field of assisted reproductive technology as well as an investigation by the Medical Board of California of the fertility specialist involved. Public reaction turned negative when it was discovered that the single mother already had other six young children at home at the time and was not financially independent. Suleman, who was unemployed and on public assistance programs at the time, conceived the octuplets and her six older children via in-vitro fertilization.
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Dad Spoke Only Klingon to Child for Three Years
Minnesota linguist d’Armond Speers has a doctorate in computational linguistics. He says he isn’t much of a Star Trek fan. But he spent the first three years of his son’s life speaking to him only in Klingon!
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
So when Ultralingua, a dictionary, translation and grammar software company in Dinkytown, honored requests from customers to create applications for a Klingon dictionary, they turned to Speers, a self-employed software consultant.
Speers helped develop a digital dictionary in Klingon for Mac, Windows, and iPhone for the software company Ultralingua. Speer’s son is now 15 years old and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon. If he had stuck with it, we’d have at least one bona-fide code talker for the CIA!
